Tag: dismantling

In All Your Right-Rightness

Posted on by Hilarey

I know several women who hate women’s retreats. It is an interesting event. I’ve had some good times and some not so great.

One I went to as a new mama had worship led by a husband and wife team the first night. He was our church’s worship pastor, and they typically sang together. After the message, the husband dressed up as an old lady to perform a comic skit like a Titus 2 older woman teaching us younger women. He held up his wife’s size-4 Christmas red negligee and said in his falsetto, “If we were having trouble with our husbands looking at naughty pictures on the new World Wide Web thing, we should just wear one of these…”

Forget the fact that I was less than three months from giving birth to my third child and regularly fell into a bed containing every known human bodily fluid… even at age 24, I knew you could not work hard enough to thwart someone else’s contrary desires when they wanted to sin. No one had ever stopped me from sinning when I wanted it. In that moment, I had a violent daydream of throwing over my chair and slamming the door on my way out. However, I’d brought a new friend whom I’d just led to the Lord. I could neither leave her there nor explain to her why we were storming out with our nursing babies.

My daydream must have reflected in my body language because an older woman behind me leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Shhh. I’ll take care of it.”

Older men and women, speak when you see something. Your voice is needed.

On the last night of the women’s retreat, when only women were there, the worship leader kept declaring that she could feel the Spirit saying to her He wanted to do something really special. She said He was moving in our midst and had something unique for us that night.

I looked at my friend and asked her if she wanted to walk down to the lake to be baptized. She was so new to the faith that she didn’t even know about water baptism. But if it was the next step in declaring her faith—she wanted it.

When I went forward to tell the worship leader that I believed what the Spirit had for us was an impromptu baptism, she froze. When she could finally form a response, it was that she just didn’t know if women were authorized to baptize people. She suggested we wait. She would call her husband, and he would come back in the morning… we could do it first thing. I felt a little too raw to invite back the guy who blamed men’s porn use on the level of their wives’ sexiness, so I opted out.

When we returned to church the following Sunday, after our lead pastor preached on “forgiveness for the brethren” (likely thanks to the older woman behind me who took care of it*) I asked him what he thought about women baptizing people. I was genuinely curious, and completely content to live within the bounds of all the restrictions placed on women.

As a side note, I feel like men in leadership never throw each other under the bus as a professional courtesy since everyone eventually misspeaks and their turn is coming. They call it a conviction to “not touch the Lord’s anointed,” and mostly just preach forgiveness, and it’s easy to be misunderstood from the pulpit. But shepherds who don’t address it publicly are complicit. If an error was publicly clarified when preachers publicly misspoke, we would have more reverent speakers and, more importantly, congregations who were practiced at discerning truth.

My pastor told me he thought it was a good practice that when the Bible is silent on a subject, we should not speak additional rules. He did not see scripture ever saying that women could not baptize someone. Now, I see a hypothetical situation where a woman would not be able to let a man plunge her under the water.

The responsibility and consequence of leading is daunting, so I had no ill feelings toward the worship pastor’s wife who was scared about what role a woman could take. At the time, I merely saw it as quenching the spirit, not a gender issue.

I say merely, but we shouldn’t be cavalier in our interactions with the Spirit who knows the mind of God. We’re warned that it’s unforgivable to blaspheme the Spirit (think repeatedly ignoring and mis-attributing his conviction, even unto death) and Thessalonians talks about extinguishing, quenching or stifling the spirit, maybe by, or in addition to, despising prophecy. Don’t quench the Spirit; we don’t comprehend the ramifications.

But that’s just so scary: walking in the uncharted instead of the written law, letting the Holy Spirit out to play in all the uncontrolled, untamed possibility. What if we can’t control or tame the believers filled with the Spirit?!

We are to discern the will of God


We have mugs and cards that include the middle two phrases of Romans 12:1-2. “Don’t be conformed to the world,” and “renew your mind.” But notice the bookends. As an act of worship—become equipped to discern the will of God.

Here it is: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”

Philippians 1:9-10 also tells us the goal is to have the ability to discern, or as the Common English Bible states it, decide what really matters.

I know there’s danger when considering experience as truth instead of a fixed point of reference. And some faith movements base truth on feelings instead of doctrine. For example, “I feel good in my heart about doing this, even though the Bible condemns it.” That’s dangerous, because I know I’m creative enough to justify anything.

So, how do we follow the rules when so much is not specifically written down, like whether or not a woman can baptize someone?

What really matters


A few years ago, my Sunday school teacher was talking about the Sabbath and following the 10 Commandments. I asked him, “Didn’t God prophesy that under the new covenant, he would write the law on our hearts?” He sighed, “Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still have to practice the Sabbath.”

It’s a common thought—but both Paul and James cautioned that if we seek to follow one part of the law, in order to be justified by it, we have to follow all of it. Seeking to be justified means you are presenting your case before God to show how worthy you are. But I would also look at it another way. Violating others with your temper while you tout sexual purity makes a mockery of Christianity to unbelievers. Keep the whole law or don’t advertise your holiness.

And even more difficult than the 613 Old Testament laws is the idea of truly embracing what Christ called the greatest commandment. Ingesting the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul—no dark corners withheld. And then swallowing the sincere conviction to love the icky neighbor you think you’re better than as yourself. If we filtered every action through those two, we would not hurt so many others, or so readily justify war.

The right wrongness


I’m not saying to ignore the law. Jesus said whoever sets aside the least command or teaches others to do the same will be the least in heaven in Matthew 5:19-20. But he finishes with the warning that you are going to need more righteousness than those who keep and teach the laws to enter heaven.

What I believe really matters: is don’t scramble to do right before God at the expense of humans.

The law love in Romans 14 talks about holding fast to your conviction regarding what you eat. It had to do with meat killed in ritual worship of gods. Paul says your freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols could cause a brother or sister to stumble. And if you cause someone to stumble, you’re not walking according to love.

We could look at this verse about meat in a couple of ways. First, we could count it up as a law we accidentally always followed, and brag about how holy we are because our burger was not killed in worship of Jupiter. (Although, the next generation might say it was slaughtered on the altar of capitalism.) Or second, we could argue that the Bible is irrelevant to our modern lives.

But even though we don’t have a pagan temple in the middle of our city sacrificing animals to Jupiter, the heart of this message is still relevant if we sympathize with the emotional reaction a first century, new believer might have felt if they previously took part in those rituals. (We participate in a symbolic and often emotional ritual when we celebrate the Eucharist.) The first-century new convert no longer wants to be associated with their former deity. They see participation as returning to enslavement.

In contrast, you want them to see that they’re not subjugated to the faith system they left. They have freedom in Christ to eat anything and glorify God for the food.

You both actually want the same thing, but there’s an impasse about how to get there. Do you eat the meat to show them your freedom? “Do not destroy, by what you eat, someone for whom Christ died,” and a few verses later, “Do not tear down God‘s work because of food.” Even though you can eat it and they should be able to eat it, doing what is right is not as important as loving them.

Your rules, lack of rules, extra convictions, and obedience to the law should not destroy the faith of someone for whom Christ died. The law of love supersedes.

Here’s how I might see this applying today. One believer is convicted that we should not exploit the crops of indigenous people, destroy the earth we’re supposed to steward with packaging and transporting food, or eat animals who show affection and fear. When I’m with someone who has a strong conviction and looks to me as a believer to uphold their idea of godliness—maybe, according to my faith—I should eat as them as a way to eat with them.

Yet, even this is not a rule. There might come a time when someone is weeping over their plate and they need to be set free. Your dogmatism, coupled with thinking that you are more right, will cause just as much pain by abstaining. Oh, the wildness of the Holy Spirit. You’re just going to have to pray in the moment for direction. But it is from him, you’re going to be free, and it’s going to be in love.

The wrong rightness

Pharisee is a word for evangelicals that conjures an evil villain for anyone who went to Sunday school as a child. And we quickly condemn the caricature as a bad guy. But ignore the bearded guy with fringes on his garment and substitute the word Pastor or Shepherd for the word Pharisee. They were the spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters.

Plus, if you’ve been in a religious space more than a minute, you’re more likely to be a Pharisee than not. Afterall, we are the church.

Ask yourself if all the men who’d dedicated their lives to studying scripture and leading Israel were actually filled with bloodlust and hate. Could some of them have been trying very hard to do what was right before God? I think the Pharisees and Sadducees really wanted to do the most-right, right-thing all the time. And, they desired to lead correctly.

But here’s how that played out. They were so careful to pinch off a portion of their herb garden, to tithe mint and rue and follow the law—but then when their elderly parents needed financial help they said, “Sorry, I already gave to God anything I might have given to you.” Jesus condemned this, but not because he was against tithing.

The Pharisees also wanted to honor the Sabbath. Don’t underestimate how important this was.

Super brief and ignorant summary of a volatile topic: God wanted his creation to rest every seventh day, to let the earth rest every seven years by not farming, and to return all property and release all slaves every 49 years (7×7) and call the following year, the 50th, The Year of Jubilee. This was so important to God that when Israel failed to do it, they were exiled to Babylon for 70 years to pay recompense for the 490 years of disobedience. The exile let the land rest for the missed Sabbaths. Even though there had been some loss of Jewish control over part of the land during the divided Kingdom after Solomon died and the Assyrian Conquest, being conquered and exiled by Babylon was the most decisive loss of Jewish sovereignty. Jewish ownership of the land was tied to obedience to God’s covenant; as promised, it was revoked when they disobeyed.

This is how it looks to me when spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters use Sunday morning to emphasize their stance on hermeneutics. Parsing out every jot and tittle, concerned with reading doctrinal statements to make sure everyone knows where they stand on issues. Angst for correctness while people leave the sanctuary in tears. Good thing you’re right, church, and everybody knows it. You’re doing great keeping the law.

Exodus 19:5-6 | Deuteronomy 4:40 | Deuteronomy 28:1-9 | Joshua 1:7-8

So, sticking to the Sabbath was a pretty significant doctrine when Israel was occupied by Rome and Jesus walked the earth. I think we downplay the sincere angst the spiritual leaders would have felt. Keep this in mind when you picture them insisting on keeping the Sabbath. The stakes are high. The leaders must keep everyone in exactitude with the law.

You are not supposed to work on the Sabbath. And Jesus kept breaking this rule in preference to human need. In this scene, Jesus and his disciples are walking through a field, hungry. Some disciples grab grain and eat it raw. Technically, this is harvesting.

Technically right, and technically righteous.

Yet, weren’t they a little off? Lifting hand from bowl-to-mouth wasn’t less work than lifting from plant-to-mouth.

The Pharisees had so much zeal for correctness; instead of discerning what truly mattered.

So, about those rules…

The Pharisees should have tithed and shown mercy. But when it comes down to it, God desires mercy over sacrifice. Jesus told the Pharisees to ponder the concept because he didn’t come for the people who get it right.

The world will know we are Christ-disciples by our love, but sometimes it seems like churches would rather be known by their doctrinal statements.

I had this concept affirmed on a podcast recently where the guest, Amy Byrd, discussed having to do some internal work about what drew her to a particular denomination where she worshiped for 15 years. She described her belief that “theological precision brought her closer to God, that precision was sanctification…”

So here I wrestle, one foot out of an issue-driven church convinced that sanctification is through adherence to gender roles. The spiritual leaders and law interpreters reiterate doctrines with zeal and fervor. They have good hearts, and much is at stake.

When my husband and I lived in Prague, we spent time with missionaries who often ignored the interpretations of their sending church. For whatever reason, they let me know when they were doing it. I also have friends who went to missionary school. While they were drowning in doctrinal precision, they were told by other missionaries, “Don’t worry, it’s different on the field.” I bet household codes are just not as important in trenches. I think church is just a thing you do on Sunday; the rest of the week is beyond the churchyard.

Christ called John the Baptist a reed in the wind when John doubted and wanted clarification. I feel camaraderie with John.

Because the winds of doctrine that buffet us are also inside the church. The issues the local church wants to exalt will knock you around just as much, and enough wind will uproot a strong tree. I want to bend on the extraneous, non-salvation issues, rather than push someone who Christ died for to the snapping point. After all, Christ did not come to break off the bruised reeds or snuff out the smoldering wicks.

Here’s to living the windy wild. Mercy, not sacrifice. Love, not getting it right.

Oh, but you should still Sabbath…

It’s Probably Her Fault

Posted on by Hilarey

I loved the first cover of my first novel. Partly because, 11 years ago, it communicated to the reader: this isn’t going to be your typical Christian fiction. I didn’t want to bait and switch.

I knew it hit the mark when I participated in a Christian fair at a community park. I set up a bookseller’s table with a few of my writer friends. An angry, sweaty-faced man stormed up with his pubescent daughter, picked up my book and started yelling at her with an extended finger. “You asked what the pastor meant by immodest! This is immodest. This is… alluring!”

He went on to belittle her for men’s lust. Then he turned and leveled his disgusted gaze towards me. He would not hand me the book, but dropped it on the table with a derisive smirk (he showed me!) and marched her away in tears. She turned ashamed eyes back toward me for a moment, so apologetic for her crime of being a girl.

Drink more water or it’s your fault

In my youth, I heard water neutralizes an acid stomach. And on the flip side, sometimes pain in your stomach meant not enough acid. Which, of course, water also helps. I think there was a thread of “pain is a construct of your mind” philosophy also woven into that. The point was: you never actually needed antacids. You just needed to drink more water. Pain was probably your fault.

When I finally broke down and bought Tums, I still felt guilt that I had eaten the wrong things. Eaten too fast. I hadn’t had enough water.

We create these rules in our minds as a sort of safekeeping. To throw out to the universe, “That would never happen to me!” and “Look, see, how I have protected myself. I followed a rule!” When others suffer, we blame. You must not have followed a rule. It’s your fault.

It’s either my fault or your fault

Every time I hear a man say that he wishes women would be sensitive and “put a little more clothing on.” I die a little inside. But… only if he’s a believer.

What he’s saying is, “It’s the women you gave us, Lord!” He is trying to make someone else responsible, so his external situations can allow him to believe that he has relinquished his inner life over to God.

Cultural modesty does not prevent rape, so what do you mean by covered up?

I laughed a little when my uncle first told me he was “a conservative Christian.” In my mind, I thought, dude, you’re from California. You don’t know what conservative is. You let your wife wear pants. (I realize now this is a political alignment, and not an expression of faith.)

Should a woman hide her shoulders so LDS men know she’s wearing garments, sealed in the temple to someone else?

Can a woman show that she has two legs like a man? I loved the exchange in the novel, The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. The missionary tried to get the African women to cover their naked breasts according to his cultural sensitivity (quite an inconvenience to nursing and working at the same time) while his wife wore pants and the men of the village couldn’t look her in the eye. They appropriately bounced their gaze away.

If you’re in certain parts of the world, maybe she needs to cover her hair. Or become as pious as a Hasidic Jew, shave her hair and wear a wig, so no one accidentally views the immodest glory of her natural hair. Surely that will make it easier for men to praise God for their maleness.

I’ve likely written before that in the autobiography Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how the need to hide and sequester her womanhood never ended—only escalated—in her submission. Even fully hidden from view with a veil obscuring her face, men’s lust arose from the sound of her walking. The echo of her womanly shoes tapping down the hall brought up images of shapely legs, so her equally pious male friend asked her to wear soft-soled shoes.

‘Ezer a guy out, all you fine helper people. It’s really hard not to sin.

There’s nothing a helper can do to make it easier for him to turn his heart, mind, and soul over to God. Not even drinking more water.

I don’t care about outside the church or the unbelieving culture at large. It only bothers me in the body. And it seems more prevalent to me the more that roles and gender are segregated in the church.

I used to not care so much about equality or women who preached because I do not desire to pastor. My hot button was abuse due to those roles. But I’m to the point that whenever I hear the term “male leadership” or “husbands, lead your wife,” I cringe because none are free when power discrepancy is justified scripturally.

The more the man views himself as set apart, and the more gender-based responsibility he assumes… the more she is lowered from a divine image bearer to his object. Possibly a treasured object under his loving care to whom he will wash the feet of, and give his life up for, yes—but an object of his, nonetheless.

And I don’t think Jesus’s intent when he said “when you look at a woman with lust you have already sinned” means a man should remove her from his line of sight instead of submitting his heart. I mean, he should both submit to God and submit to women out of reverence to Christ.

If you’re afraid you’re going to pinch the tush of every female you see in the memory care facility during your senility—then view all women as your sister/daughters now, in the secret places of your reasoning. I heard a pastor once say that if you put a muzzle on a mean dog, you still have a mean dog. And I think during old age, we lose some muzzles of society. Hiding less of my sarcastic thoughts now that I’m fifty is a perfect example.

Neither should he keep women from the inner sanctum/lair because of the reminder that her sex difference is a portable temptation to him. Soft-soled shoes won’t remove lust just because she is neither seen nor heard. I wonder if, like objectification, the segregation of gender roles, and the ardent belief that men and women cannot be friends (because her organs dictate her one role) actually exasperates lust.

I know that belief contributes to the deep pain of the childless in the church. She is your friend, too. I have some close friends that might argue this point with me. But I think unpracticed interaction and segregation breeds, “She smiled at me. That means she probably wants to have sex with me,” as much as it reveals how the core belief of inequality spreads its tentacles into all interactions. Approaching an unavailable woman shows your belief that females have one function for you.

Sister, there is no way to prevent someone else from sinning against you. And if men will not see women as equal standing in the body of Christ, segregating or deferring to the gender at large will not change it. Differences are needed in community.

How to change it? Step up.

I believe using your gifting, according to your faith, and in whatever space will allow you, will move things. When we arrived in Israel for our tour, our Southern Baptist pastor raised his eyebrows at me and said “The tour guide is a woman?! Uh oh. We’ll see how this goes…” I was so annoyed that I, out of the whole group, was the one to whom he showed his prejudice.

Her people had escaped the Spanish inquisition. She was a born-again Jewess, living in the holy land and her family had practiced Jewish traditions and rituals her whole life. She had intimate knowledge of things like the Passover supper and which coins were exchanged in the first century temple. She spoke three languages. But she had this one thing against her—a uterus. At the end of the tour, our pastor asked his “heavy hitters” to kick in a little more money. He wanted to pay her extra because of her unanticipated value: she didn’t hold back her teaching.

As we’re being conformed to the image of Christ, we should not should stop trying to renew our minds or move toward the new kingdom. The kingdom where both men and women are now the priests of God, fully endowed with all the gifts of the spirit to shine light, regardless of our unique organs related to procreation.

And (this is only for the men who lead through gender instead of spirit-gifting) when you think of yourself as the head of everything—realize how often you ask her to step in for you. How you create a paradigm where you declare you are the leader, but are not empowered through gender alone, so you blame the girls.

Give your husband sex and then he’ll be faithful to you.
Take care of your body and then he’ll be attracted to you.
Dress modestly, then he will see you as a sister.
Submit first, then he will love you.
If you follow him, then he will lead.

I don’t think this is a problem for humans who weren’t raised in the church. I don’t think it’s an issue for girls who weren’t told, “Men only want one thing from you. Girls have (only) one precious gift. One thing of value.”

And I also don’t believe it’s a problem for men who view women as equal.

Back ordered and out-of-print Christianity

Movements sell books. I think much of the purity movement was people who rejected the sexual freedom of their youth. They over-corrected, and wanted a rule to corral suffering this side of heaven—to blame pain and dysfunction on something that could be controlled. Drink more water and it won’t be your fault! Or, they wanted absolution: I didn’t know the rule—so it wasn’t my fault. They wanted to redeem their virginity through their children and so promised them a false god, a sexual prosperity that they had no intimate knowledge of.

How we long for simple, descriptive, reproducible formulas! Tweetable existentialism. A theology with a man’s name on it.

I used to dismiss Jehovah’s Witnesses because (to my understanding) they weren’t allowed to read the Bible unless they viewed it through the lens of the Watchtower’s interpretation and accompanying literature. At least they are honest in their gatekeeping.

Now, I realize it’s the same in our churchyard. So much of what we peddle for book sales is a tangent to the gospel; slapping a man’s last name on our affiliation and pledging allegiance to it. We search for commentaries that explain what we want to believe. Or we sit under people who write commentaries that prove what we want to believe. One human cannot accurately contain all the deep mysteries of God—we were designed for community. So even if it that doctrine has sustained a couple hundred years, parts of it will be wind and its followers the reeds.

Making the straight and narrow, straighter and narrower since 1845

The Southern Baptist faction began for segregation. Churches were allowing non-whites in their congregations and they wanted to keep the truer faith of the good ol’ days. I was raised in the faith and given a hearty fear of liberal sects like the American Baptists. Now, as an adult, I’m becoming increasingly averse to historical denominations, dogma containing surnames, and movements. No matter how new, no matter how old. The dividing walls are not just gender, but a more systemic problem of gatekeeping and control of the money machine.

The other morning I read a blog by a woman who wrote a disclaimer that she was, after all, still Eve‘s daughter. She was diminishing God’s ability to speak truth through her since she believed all women were fundamentally more likely to be deceived. The theology she puts her faith in sells a lot of books and has for centuries. It was like saying, “I wish I could ask a man about this—since I can’t trust my lady-brain. Unfortunately, every time I try to, he thinks I want to sleep with him.”

The real upset is when laypeople and uneducated start digging. Even worse, armchair theologians like me reading the Bible and trying to parse out truth. As my dad reminded me, “Well, anyone can put up a blog.”

William Tyndale was executed because he translated directly from Greek and Hebrew instead of the church-authorized Latin Vulgate. The original texts undermined key doctrines of The Church. Plus, he translated into the English common tongue. The educated couldn’t fathom someone as a lowly as a plow-hand understanding holy scripture.

If no one is making money off it—is it really a valid doctrine?

Back when I thought I was called to be a missionary, I came across a lovely little book by Amy Carmichael, called Mimosa. It is the story of a young girl who hears the simplest of gospel messages one afternoon and receives it. The family could only send one child to the missionary school, so she returned home.

She grows up, becomes a wife and a mother and spends her life in a village far away from any Christians, the Bible, or Christian culture. She’s reunited to the writer decades later—only to find that with this tiny seed of God’s love for her, she’d lived a life convicted of, and in obedience to, many biblical concepts that directly opposed the culture of India where she made her home. Simple things like, it didn’t honor the God who loved her to go into debt she couldn’t repay. And big things, like trust in the Almighty for an empty belly.

I wonder about all the time I spend pondering women’s roles in the American church, when so many in the world don’t have access to “drink more water.” I’m sure we give too much effort talking about concepts, and laminating membership cards to Apollos or Paul, when, if we were just moving around outside in the world—the Holy Spirit would tell us how to take the next step.

But on the flip side, as we watch the exodus of believers who leave wounded and disillusioned from faith spaces, maybe it’s time for more armchair theologians to examine the dogma of our tradition.

And here is where it lands so heavy on me. No one questions your gifting when you are ministering outside the churchyard. The only place any of this applies is inside the building with a logo and a security team, where you can buy their books.

prayers in cracks of the wailing wall, 2018

Kicking Bricks & Flipping Tables

Posted on by Hilarey

I’ve heard foundations cannot be changed. (I feel like this is said when people describe how America was started as a Christian nation and therefore it could never not be a Christian nation.) But sometimes houses are moved from their foundations and placed in other areas. You can also lift a house and pour a new foundation—it’s just very costly.

So before you need to relocate the whole structure, I think it’s a good policy to not assume that you have a totality of the gospel already inside of you. Sometimes I prefer to seek affirmation for things I already believe, but when I approach the Bible with curiosity rather than angrily seeking confirmation—I usually enjoy it more. (Although, looking for something you know can be healing when it refutes lies. And a little confirmation bias does give a jolt of dopamine.)

I’m not an architect or an engineer, but my simple understanding is that if there is a crack in your foundation, it doesn’t mean you should heap more weight on top. When you do that, and the earthquake comes, you’re more likely to lose your faith completely.

Although they have built thousands of years on top of the stones where Jesus walked.

prayers in cracks of the wailing wall, 2018
My trip to (and under) the wailing wall in 2018.

Be willing to walk around the house and kick the bricks, checking for cracks in your foundation. Because we repeat so many things that are not actually biblical.

Not a Lender Nor a Borrower Be

One thing I was told with such authority was, “the Bible says to never lend or borrow.” I keep digital notes when something comes up during my Bible reading. That way, I can see them wherever I go, and add to them whenever I have space to process. The words I jot down could be anything from beautiful, resonating, irritating, confusing… but I especially like to add things that contradict either my paradigm or something else I’ve read in the Bible. This is how I kick the bricks of my foundation.

The first time I read, “You will lend to many nations, but borrow from none” in Deuteronomy 28:12, I thought to myself, “this contradicts not a lender nor a borrow or be.” So I did a quick search: “What does the Bible have to say about lending?” (I love digital Bibles.)

It says to not be tight-fisted to the poor. And when (not if) you lend, do not charge interest. I should lend.

I can’t find it telling me not to borrow, either. It says “the borrower is a slave to the lender” in Proverbs. Therefore, I want to have prudence when I decide to borrow because I am giving over my freedom until the debt is paid.

Proverbs is a collection of truths perceived by a wise person, but I don’t ever want to take one verse from it and turn it into a non-negotiable mantra. Otherwise I would get whiplash when I read chapter 26 verses four and then five.

As it turns out, the scripture “not a lender nor a borrower be” is from Hamlet. You can watch the Skipper sing it on Gilligan’s Island here.

My girlfriend calls that “the pizza bible.” You just say things you want or believe with authority and call it scripture. The bible says to bring me a pizza.

But you can also eat from the pizza bible it by taking things out of context.

Happy Good Friday

The Jesus who resonates most with me right now is the one who flips tables at the beginning of Holy Week. Sometimes I need to pull back and ask if I’m really called to flip everything I see over on its side. But to me, the God who comes down and passionately removes the gatekeepers restricting access to him is a God who sees and understands.

Black and white thinking from English translations only (or even worse, fixating on a single version) and taking it out of context means you could take a verse like 1 Timothy 1:10 and…

if you read ESV, you would come to the conclusion that it’s only immoral for men to practice homosexuality.

if you read the KJV, you would understand that only menstealers are immoral—it is fine to kidnap women.

We lose so much in English translations because we have humankind or mankind written as “men.” It lands in our mind as “not women” because it isn’t built into English to see humans/genders in the word “man.”

When I read the New Testament in Spanish, it reads differently. Yesterday, I got to sit with someone who reads/studies it in Greek. And his take was fascinatingly different from my ESV.

Personal Application

So, kicking your bricks… After you check if it’s actually in the Bible… see if it aligns with the context of the message, then in context with the heart of God. If it doesn’t work with your understanding of the heart of God… write it down rather than throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater.

The next step is to ask, what does this mean for me in 21st century America versus the time and people it was written for?

Because you could write Paul’s advice to Timothy, “take a little wine for your stomach” on a 3X5 card and tape it to your bathroom mirror. And the morning you have a nervous belly because you need to drive a bus full of teenagers up a mountain road, you decide to take the inerrant scripture literally, regardless of the context of who it was written for, assume it is all directly for you, pour a mug of wine, and get behind the wheel.

There needs to be room for the Holy Spirit to tell you if it applies.

The friend I visited with yesterday mentioned that it is a little narcissistic to take every jot and tittle written for the New Testament church as directly applying to me, in America, today.

I have to take this to heart. Because there was such an emphasis on “where does the Bible say that” in my youth, I remember looking down on women who wore braids. I mean, it literally says don’t braid your hair in the ESV. And I have always wanted to correctly handle the Word of God. It just turns out there is more nuance than looking up a verse.

So much pain happens when you listen to what other people tell you God has said—instead of picking up the Bible and finding out for yourself. Then judging it according to the whole heart of God using the heart, mind and soul he gave you.

Take Luck

Posted on by Hilarey

“Take Luck” was from a skit by stand-up comedian Brian Regan, where he talked about intending to say, “Take Care,” and then switching to “Good Luck,” halfway through. It’s a funny one.

I think of it when sending a meaningless salutation. To offer without really offering. Take some luck from somewhere, and have it. Keep it with you. I also think of his skit when I see generic signs that say something like, “have faith” or “be blessed!”

Have faith in what? Be blessed how? Take some luck with you—I think there’s a bowl on the counter.

James 2:16 says, “and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?” It’s like when you pass a homeless person on a frigid night, on your way back to your car, and you call out, “Stay warm!”

There is power in words and power in prayer, and it is significant when you speak a blessing over someone’s life. That’s different from when someone has a need, you see it, and you have a tangible item like a spare coat. Something to hold on to.

Substance

Have you ever experienced making up a story about someone in your head? You go into the creepy part of Wonderland (down a dark rabbit trail.) And then when you see the person, or talk to them, you know right away that none of it is true. Your theory had no substance. Nothing to hold on to.

All it took was a conversation to find out the truth.

This used to be the annoying thing about simple romances to me when I was a young girl… especially because I value (kind) directness. I could never get behind a heroine whose entire conflict was a misunderstanding or an unspoken clarification. If they would just have that conversation already, there would be no book.

I have another quote from Good Boundaries and Goodbyes by Lisa Terkeurst, since it’s what I’m reading right now, “Relationships often die not because of conversations that were had but rather conversations that were needed, but never had.”

It’s true, we can write out scenarios that seem like reality. And then a bit of truth, not even a deep dive, and we find out differently.

Making it up

We watched a few episodes of the Good Place and their funny world-building includes a heaven that “no one could imagine.” They have a picture in heaven’s office of a guy who got really stoned and said, “This is what I think heaven will totally be like.” He’s heralded as the guru who got the closest.

It’s meant to be hilarious, but many people treat things of God, and eternity this way.

Most people believe they are critical thinkers, not emotional. But faith without substance is stoned-luck. No matter how critically you look at the void, it’s still empty.

Scales and measuring cups

My friend mentioned something to me that has proved itself true again and again. She said she thought she was eating in her caloric budget until she started writing things down. I’ve seen it myself. Recently, I saw somebody order something in a restaurant that looked delicious. So I tried to copy it at home. I made a light shrimp and fettuccine salad. But when I added it to MyFitnessPal, it was 800 calories. The restaurant had served double. Not exactly a light lunch.

And even more than just logging what you’re eating, you can think that something looks like an appropriate portion—until you weigh it. It’s doubtful that the average eater actually knows what 25 grams of fiber looks like over the course of a day. Due to years of cooking, I can judge weight and volume close to accurate and often cook without measuring. But when it really matters, I still get out the scale.

So, upon closer inspection, you see details more accurately when you actually weigh yourself against the Bible.

And let’s be honest, another interesting correlation is that the days I don’t want to obey or know the scale… those are the days I don’t measure food. So there’s a submission/discipline factor of not wanting to know if I measure up. Sometimes I just want to eat like an asshole. This is likely a larger contributing factor (besides laziness or time management) for not looking in the Bible. We don’t want to see if we measure up.

But here’s the problem, someone who is a Christian, but doesn’t read the Bible, is really susceptible to the weird tangents of Christian religion. Taking someone else’s word for what the scriptures say inevitably lays the groundwork for future deconstruction. This is what children do: accept the world through the lens and experience of those over them. This is not what a maturing Christian does.

You don’t want to have a void or ungrounded faith that can’t weather storms. Take some luck, and keep it with you. Care for it.

So, you can be frustrated with what you think about God. You can be frustrated with what you think about the church. But if you’re not holding it up to a depth of study in the word, you are not frustrated with substance. You’re following a rabbit down a hole. If you look at the way the letters to the church explained the right way to live—and then you see how Christians are disobeying—that’s something to hold on to.

I used to get annoyed when I saw a verse partially quoted. (Romans 8:1a) But then I realized that the chapters and verses were added. So even memorizing a whole verse can miss the larger context. That isn’t even to mention re-wording and misquoting. I’ve seen people defend mis-worded scripture with tears. This happens when you “already know what it says” before you read it. But that’s another topic.

I love a quote I heard from Theologian Preston Sprinkle. He says, “Let the strength of your conviction reflect the depth of your study.” Pick the mountain you’ll die on.

You are doing yourself an extreme disservice if you hold your convictions tight in your head and heart, without opening the Bible to check their weight.

So the point is, get out the scales. Grab on to something solid. Read for yourself.

Dismantling Human Tradition

Posted on by Hilarey

When I was young, I told my mom a name I wanted to give to a future child. Her quick response was that if my future husband had ever known someone by that name—and didn’t like the person—he wouldn’t want the memory of them in his home.

The same name, the same word, can have different connotations.

The term “Deconstruction” has taken on a definition all its own in Christendom. It is basic etymology. As words popularize and morph meaning, they assume new preconceptions and sometimes baggage.

Maybe you know someone who deconstructed and ran screaming from the faith, destroying others. So, you hate the concept. It is scarier to watch someone else do it, but this is where westerners get to experience “Though none go with me, I still will follow.”

When God reveals a lie that I’ve believed, it’s usually painful. But it is an exhilarating process and increases my faith. The writers in my critique group who wrote for Love Inspired Suspense always incorporated a lie that their heroes and heroines believed: to be overcome before the end of the novel.

But what happens when it isn’t just a lie about your worthiness or purpose, but a lie about your faith? And what if it’s a dozen at once, more confusion than you can handle, so you are not sure if you can trust what is truth from your entire foundation?

I feel like continuing to build upon lies because you don’t want to lose your faith is more dangerous than realizing that you have something weak in the foundation and then inspecting or tearing it down.

A few years ago, some of my foundational bricks eroded.

An existential crisis of faith can become a spring cleaning if you don’t fear what you’ll find. Be more afraid of ignoring it. Deconstruction for me was merely inspecting which bricks were made of hay and stubble, fingering them out of the foundation, and replacing them with something worthy.

I guess that’s more like dismantling. When you want to keep all the good parts of a machine but pull every piece out and line them up to find the broken cog and replace it.

When terms take on baggage, we can try renaming them. But that’s just semantics. If everyone started using the new term, replacing deconstruction with dismantling or something else, it would just morph in definition and still offend some and not others.

Dismantling Human Tradition

For me, deconstruction was not questioning the Bible. But it has involved not fixating on single word inerrancy and literalism. Because it’s a simplistic translation that says Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Man doesn’t have one missing rib and, metaphorically, the word could mean side. As in, a side of man that is no longer in him is now embodied in woman.

But more than multiple translations of a single word—I’ve had to wrestle with the way the Bible was deciphered in our country and era. It was through the lens of human tradition that made me assume what certain things in the Bible meant.

As I’ve altered my view on eternal conscious torment I realized my belief can reinforce my understanding of scripture when I’m reading.

Some form of deconstruction has to happen to every believer. At least everyone who comes to faith as a child or is raised under someone else’s faith. That’s how to make what you’ve heard your own faith.

We also need to dissect things we’ve heard that were just a tangent of someone else’s faith journey. A situation where you never heard the resolution, only the plaguing question. “Why did he have to die?”

Or maybe we only heard the answer to something, but not the process. This is frequent in the New Testament. We’re often given a specific answer to a specific question in a context that is not explained, because everyone knew it. “Women cover your heads.”

Misunderstood

Premarital sex in the church comes with a lot of shame, so I remember someone quoting to me, “The marriage bed is sacred.” It was lovely… very redeeming… and good in the moment I first heard it. But it was also quoted to imply that “everything goes” in the marriage bed. If you’re married, it’s kosher…

Without the whole-Bible framework, this example of misquoting scripture can become license for anything. Because the verse is actually a command to, “Keep the marriage bed sacred.” Imagine my surprise when I found it written very different than free-license. Keep the marriage bed sacred is a lot more congruent with the whole of scripture which says God will judge fornicators and adulterers.

The Letter of the Law But Not the Heart

Scripture does not need to be misquoted to be taken out of the whole-heart of the gospel. If you read that someone cannot deny their spouse intimacy without also applying God’s design for equality, consent, and selfless love, it allows marital rape and oppression.

Or the popularly quoted OT scripture that a girl must marry her rapist. At the time, and still in some current cultures, a rape victim was utterly destroyed. She became ineligible for marriage, and since children were the only way to provide for her future, she would be completely destitute. So, giving her “raised status” as a wife, in a home, and then not being allowed to divorce her actually redeemed her living needs.

This is why I bristle when someone wants to look up a scripture to prove a point.

Be careful when you accept thoughts and statements that sound biblical. Be careful when you quote a portion of the text without the whole-heart, or use it as a weapon against yourself or others. You might lay a brick of stubble in someone’s foundation.

Also, be wary of taking your interpretation or personal directive as prescriptive law. Just because God revealed to you that you should not masturbate, it doesn’t mean you should tell the whole high school youth group that masturbation is sin. Rather, share how God can speak individually through the heart of scripture for a specific need in the moment.

Acts 18:24-26 says Apollos was mighty in scripture and knew many things but a husband and wife team, Priscilla and Aquila, took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.

More Accurately

Some many people have used the verse “God hates divorce” as a weapon. God hates me, or God hates that a person got divorced. It’s quoted with disregard that God is speaking about hating the violence of divorce against the vulnerable, inside of a covenant which should protect them. Doesn’t it make more sense that he hated the blood on the garments of men who abused women by treating them like objects and divorcing them?

Yet, my grandma couldn’t teach Sunday school because she’d been divorced. That’s human tradition.

The Bible Project App has a great series right now about the Sermon on the Mount. You listen to a pleasant reading of scripture, a snippet of a discussion, and a short video commentary each week while working through the passage.

Week 20 speaks to divorce, and it helped me wrestle with some of the misquoted verses and lies I’ve always had. (Week 18 also validated why looking at someone with lust dehumanizes them.)

The Bible Project unpacks the specific question surrounding that cultural debate of divorce. It speaks to a situation which doesn’t align perfectly today, since men can’t cast aside their wives without income and protection because she ruins dinner. But when we take this reply from Jesus and repeat the Bible literally word for word, we think the only legit reason for divorce is infidelity.

Human tradition uses the Bible to justify social power. Dismantling and deconstruction can remove the barbs of weaponized, incomplete thoughts from scripture to see the larger context of God’s provision for humanity. Dismantling human tradition has been beautiful. I am meeting a good God.

Deconstruction isn’t just pulling the entire structure down because of tragedy or tough things you don’t understand. It’s testing all the bricks with fire. And even if most of them burn up—can’t God build from the ground anew? All we need is the cornerstone. Hold on to Christ and wrestle with everything else.

You don’t need a brick that says “7 day creation with dinosaurs.” You don’t need a brick that says “musical instruments and dim lighting followed by a 35 minute, three-point sermon.”

I mean… wasn’t the Jesus freak movement just removing the bricks that said, “men can’t have long hair” and, “you must wear shoes to church?”

Don’t fear the wilderness if your worthless structure is burning down. Let human traditions turn to ash, keep only the cornerstone.